Monthly Archives: October 2012

Several people have asked me to publish this list of standards. Taken from the appendix of Mark Levine’s The Jazz Theory Book, this is the “don’t go to New York without learning these tunes” list. I recommend you at least know how all of these songs sound. My method was to make a playlist containing all of them and listen to it continuously. When a song comes on, if you can name it and hum the entire melody, you can take it off the list. Of course that doesn’t mean you “know” the song, but it gets you acquainted with 300-odd important tunes fairly quickly. And by fairly quickly I mean over a few months. I also recommend using recordings of singers when possible — I have an easier time committing songs to memory if I know the words.